Federal officials said there's no evidence to support a report that hackers destroyed a pump used by an Illinois-based water utility after gaining unauthorized access to the computer system it used to operate its machinery.

Whatever your views on its programming, it is hard to deny that the BBC’s research labs have produced some pretty clever things over the years. Teletext, RDS and Nicam stereo are just some of the more well known ones, but the R&D Lab is also responsible for much of the work on the DVB-T2 standard that makes Freeview HD possible, as well as research on topics like resolution and screen size that Reg Hardware has looked at before.

Many passengers are concerned about the data security and safety aspect of Transport for London's (TfL's) plans to introduce contactless ticketing, and the project may not deliver the financial savings expected, the London assembly's transport committee has concluded.

Allowing people to use computers to 'mine' vast banks of copyrighted material would damage the economy, the UK Publishers Association has said. It wants to block an exception to copyright law for the practice.

IBM has a new release of its SVC software coming out to widen the distance between cluster nodes, improve HA and provide better Tivoli integration. This strengthens the V7000 too, as it shares the same SVC binary code.

Apple secured a patent yesterday on software to create and identify 3D models of faces, animals, aircraft, military vehicles and tumours in one of the more unusual tech patents to be awarded in recent months. This came to light after the US Patent and Trademark Office published a series of newly awarded patents.

In November 2001, IBM made its Java tools IDE and platform, developed for WebSphere Application Studio, available under an open source licence. It was the beginning of Eclipse, which now claims 65 per cent of the Java IDE market. But why was Eclipse founded and what has been its impact over a decade?

Remorseless German boffins say that the time may now be ripe for scientists to begin release of "transgenic individuals into populations". Concerns that this might result in those populations being completely replaced by the superior lab-developed individuals can be addressed, they say, by the use of cunningly selected mutants.

After Britain's Chief Rabbi criticised the consumerism of the late Great High Priest of Apple, a professor of applied ethics at Hofstra University has joined the crew of Jobs-knockers, saying that we shouldn't venerate the Apple CEO because of his well-documented bad behaviour.

A Scottish beach has been cordoned off as a "contaminated land" by environmental-protection authorities following discovery of "radioactive particles" there, thought to result from Ministry of Defence activities in the past. Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has seen fit to write to the Defence secretary, urging the MoD to act. Surely this is a very serious business?

James Murdoch has sensationally resigned from News Group Newspapers' board of directors, thereby seemingly turning his back on News International's remaining British publications: The Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times.

Let’s say that you and your pals need to build a high performance cluster to run a number of HPC apps. It has to be fast. Damned fast. Fast enough to beat the very best student-built systems from seven other universities.

You shouldn't laugh at Saints Row: The Third. I mean, what's funny about bludgeoning an old lady to death with a three-foot-long purple dildo? Or kidnapping a gimp-wearing BDSM fetishist and forcing him to to pull your chariot in gladiatorial Pony Play?

The Cabinet Office is a second senior man down just one month after the department published an ambitious action plan detailing deadlines for when it hopes to implement the IT strategy it announced in March this year.

There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.

The House of Commons has changed its opinion that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 mimics the London bombings, amending an Early Day Motion that proposed the BBFC take further precautions when allowing a game to be sold.

I'm back again at my daily job after a week travelling between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It's clear that the hot topics there are cloud and flash storage; in fact the first meeting I had last week in Silicon Valley was with OpenStack.

Computers in classrooms are so common today, we may forget this was once inconceivably difficult. Computers were very expensive and so large they needed a huge truck to transport them. Nearly 35 years ago, I worked on an ambitious but ill-fated project to bring a minicomputer to rural Iowa schools, a classroom on wheels.

With server nodes getting more cores and fatter main memories, you might be thinking that the need for larger symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers, whether they are physical, like the ones sold by the major system makers, or virtual, like those created using the vSMP hypervisor and interconnect from ScaleMP, would be diminishing in popularity. Not so.

Apple plans to offer modest discounts on Macs, iPads, and iPods for one day only on Friday, according to the 9to5Mac website, which said a trusted tipster leaked the details of its day-after-Thanksgiving sales.

Kindle Fire users may have to damp their enthusiasm for rooting their devices: unless they’re prepared to chase up some other fixes and put up with some inconvenience, rooting the device kills video access.

Japanese semiconductor group Rohm, working with Osaka University researchers, has showed off a prototype chip it says can pump an impressive 1.5 Gbps down a wireless channel using carrier frequencies in the Terahertz range.